“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much…” (Luke 16:10)

“I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?”(John 3:12)

It seems the Lord was showing me that these verses can refer to how we manage and steward and understand TIME. He gives us TIME in this temporal world and watches to see how we will use it. And if we do well (according to His idea of “well”), then He is ready to entrust us with heavenly, eternal things!

Sometimes, when we experience God’s tangible Presence, Eternity invades our temporal reality and TIME seems to disappear, as it is overwhelmed and displaced by His eternal, infinite Glory. And as we experience Him like this, everything in our lives begins to be transformed. But if we want to experience this infusion, we need to approach and esteem temporal TIME rightly — by spending a lot of it on Him, being willing to lavish Him with one of the few types of CURRENCY that really impresses Him — our TIME.

God’s love is amazing — and it’s essential that we know how much He loves us. But we also desperately need the fear of God. Don’t you think Adam and Eve knew God loved them? They walked with Him, intimately interacted with Him, and lived in a glorious paradise He made for them. But that didn’t stop them from choosing another way when it was presented to them by the enemy. And that’s because they did not have the fear of God. If they had, I believe things would have turned out differently.

Thefear of the Lordis the unshakable knowledge that outside of God’s will, there is nothing but death, darkness and despair. Even Jesus had the fear of the Lord (Isaiah 11:3). And if He “delighted” in it, perhaps we should too.

Like this:

“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world — the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does — comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”(1 John 2:15-17)

Typically the word “world” here (cosmos) is understood, in this context, to be the world system as organized by fallen men. And we are called to love the people in the system, but to reject the system itself, and to not lust after what it has to offer — to be “IN the world, bot not OF the world.”